Preface

The breakdown of hierarchical barriers during
the 1970s and 80s in America between Western art music,
African-American music, rock, and even pop has resulted in an
unprecedented crisis of identity for art music in recent times. One
of the distinguishing marks of this period has been the tendency to
embrace music outside of one's own genre in order to forge new sound
within a given context. This trend has given us an aesthetic
landscape with much advocacy by various interest groups for seemingly
mutually exclusive methods of composition or musical procedure, but
no critical theory with any collective consensus or consent.

While this can be looked upon as a wonderful
state of affairs, allowing ideas to cross-pollinate happily in
spring's breeze, it also has had the rather distressing effect of
creating a great deal of confusion among artists, critics, and
producers. That this is clearly the case is evident when one
considers that no one had succeeded in pasting a generic label on art
music over the past twenty years. The music of composers coming out
of a classical background working in academic and non-academic
settings has been variously labeled: new-music, music of the
avant-garde, contemporary music, Western art music, post-modern
music; the list goes on and on, with new descriptive terms being
invented as the old ones are appropriated or begin to apply to other
genres of music.

For, example, composers who began working in
the fifties tend to feel comfortable with the label "avant-garde":
"I'm an avant-garde composer", they'll say. But so is Ornette
Coleman. Or Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Carla Bley and Max Roach. So is
Captain Beefheart and Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Is this a problem? Of
course not! But it doesn't serve to help composers of Western art
music in defining for themselves, as well as for the public, what it
is that they actually do, assuming that they know for themselves!
While it can be said that all of us working in advanced forms of
rock, African-American art music, and art music coming out of a
classical context are making sounds that can variously be called new
music, avant-garde music, art music, and so on, it can hardly be said
that we all share similar backgrounds, histories, or formal concerns.
The simple fact is that while there are many points of intersection,
our music is very different. Thank God!

The term "art music" is inadequate when applied
to contemporary-composers-coming-out-of-a-classical-music-tradition;
the term "art music" can surely be applied with equal veracity to the
music of Duke Ellington (b. 1899) as it can to Aaron Copland (b.
1900). However, as C.C.C.O.O.A.C.M.T. are dealing with continually
changing and devilishly elusive definitions of what their music is
supposed to be, operating, as they all too often do, outside any
commercial context, for the sake of convenience and with no intention
of connoting an hierarchy between the genres of music, I will simply
use the term "art music" when referring to C.C.C.O.O.A.C.M.T.

This chronicle is a personal account of
post-minimalism music in New York City during the seventies and
eighties. In a general way, it is directed to those concerned with
interesting developments in art music over the past two decades, but
perhaps more specifically to those who would like to better
understand the evolution of electric music within an avant-garde
context during this period in New York. It proposes that it is now
time to glean what was learned from the plurality and confusion of
the seventies and eighties to forge new and vital music within the
effervescent boundary of art music, as well as a possible agenda for
the years ahead.

The first section is a bit of the history that
led Western European and North American art music to the peculiar
point it occupied at the dawn of the nineties. In the second section
I switch to the first person and, taking the viewpoint of the
founder/director of the music program at the Kitchen and an active
member of the post-minimalist generation of composers on the New York
downtown music scene since 1970, I give a firsthand account of how
art music and its composers in New York City developed during the
seventies and eighties. The final section returns to the third
person, sums up many of the conclusions drawn in the previous
sections, and outlines possible initiatives for fresh musical
investigation.

Section 1

A Synopsis of 20th Century Art Music

Toward the end of the last century,
equal-temperament and chromaticism presented composers with a new
musical challenge, which Arnold Schoenberg liked to call the
"emancipation of dissonance." The equal-tempered system, with its
placement of semi-tones at equidistant intervals exploded previous
notions of harmony, conceptions of chordal progression, and the
tyranny of the triad. Pitch no longer had to relate to a tonal center
implied by a key, but could exist as a thing-in-itself. The beginning
of this century saw the invention of a new key: the key consisting of
12 semi-tones.

Although composers such as Busoni, Debussy,
Ives, Mahler, and Scriabin intuited the implications of this new key,
it was Arnold Schoenberg who first formulated a comprehensive theory
for the manipulation and ordering of the twelve tones. Twelve-tone
theory was extrapolated upon by Anton Webern and continued to be
evolved by composers through the fifties, when it developed into the
form known as serialism, or the International Style. By this time not
only pitch was subjected to systematic organization, but other
parameters of music as well: rhythm, amplitude, timbre, and dynamic.

The post-war period in Europe and America was
indeed a momentous time for music in the sense that truly new sounds
were being discovered through electronic production and
extended-instrumental technique: new forms and methods of composing
were being forged. Once composers began to break away from
traditional modes of thinking about tonality and form, they found
they needed to go to the very roots of music's definition in order to
seriously question what it was supposed to be. For example, if it was
possible to have a single 12-note key, was it not also possible to
introduce noise into the sound palette, as suggested by Filippo
Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto? Would it be possible to
have a composition whose form was about not having a form, as John
Cage suggested? Could letting out a butterfly out of a jar be
considered a piece of music, wondered La Monte Young?

Composers also began to experiment with radical
new forms of notation, examining the possibility that traditional
notation might in fact be forcing the listener into fixed ways of
hearing music. What would happen if things were loosened up a bit by
writing the pitch exactly but leaving the rhythm somewhat open to the
performer, as Luciano Berio did in his Sequenza for solo
flute? In early compositions by Christian Wolff, the general
principle resembled a game: for example, the action of one musician,
whenever he initiated it, would set off the action of another
musician. In Play, by Morton Subotnick, the rules are as
definite as a board game; in certain places, depending on what
happens, certain things are done; you move ahead or you go back, and
so on.

The end of the fifties saw a hybrid musical
landscape, with composers on one side of the fence advocating
complete control of all the parameters of music, attempting to reduce
music to a science, and on the other side the composers who continued
to push the definitions of music through the use of indeterminacy,
chance operations, stochastic principles, rule-oriented pieces, and
more. The composition of music and the sound of the resulting
performances had reached the outer limits of the performers technical
capacities, doing its intrepid best to be as arcane as possible. At
times it seemed comprehension was limited only to a select core of
hardened new music fans. By the early sixties, a critic of the New
York Times had gone so far as to write a shocking article on
the composer Milton Babbitt, a composer who was a leader of this
school, entitled: "Who cares if you understand?"

There was a consensus among composers of the
time that it was considered a compromise to write music with even a
veneer of accessibility, for accessibility was not a part of the
theoretical platform. It seemed one needed to be a specialist in
modern music, or perhaps in love with someone who was, in order to
fully appreciate the music which was being written around that time.
In other words, for an ambitious young composer at the end of the
fifties or the beginning of the sixties, tonality was out and
dissonance was in. Or at least some kind of noise! He could take
comfort in knowing that there was a well-defined agenda for music
outlined in periodicals such as the German publication Die
Reihe, and in America, Perspectives in New Music and
Source Magazine, to name only three of the many publications
devoted to this music.

Once composers began to understand that
liberation was possible from 19th century precepts of tonality and
form, many of them began to wonder if they could also be liberated
from the notes themselves by introducing noise into the sound
palette. John Cage, with prophetic accuracy, wrote in 1937, "I
believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and
increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of
electrical instruments." As early as the 1920s, Edgard Varèse
envisioned a machine that would produce electronic music. However,
the first compositions involving pure electronic noise didn't come
until the 1950s when the vision of electronic music and the tape
recorder was realized with compositions such as John Cage's
William's Mix (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958), Edgard
Varèse's Poème Electronique (1958), and
Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56).
Additionally, in France there was a pioneering "musique
concrète" school consisting entirely of natural sounds
electronically altered and recorded on tape, led by Pierre Schaefer
in Paris and Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening in New York. These
pieces were important in further defining possible sound palettes for
music, since most audiences of this time were not recognizing
noise-compositions as music.

Other composers favored the belief that
electronic sound composition should not be used to imitate or extend
traditional music, but should be developed as a distinct medium.
These included Richard Maxfield, David Tudor, and James Tenney in New
York; the Sonic Arts Union consisting of Robert Ashley, David
Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma; and the San Francisco Tape Music
Center (now at Mills College) with Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros
and Ramon Sender. In addition, research was being done in sound
laboratories, most of them in universities, led by the
Colombia-Princeton group who pioneered the RCA-Victor Synthesizer, by
Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, by the experimental music studio at
the University of Illinois, and by many others who were exploring
every conceivable aspect of electronic music production.

It was against this background that a new
yearning developed among composers who had come of age on the frozen
wastelands of serialism. In this decade of the sixties, with its
emphasis on social issues and human rights, it was whispered among
certain circles of composers that their music had perhaps become too
elitist, existing rarefied in the ivy-covered towers of the
university or government supported radio. They began to crave for a
new simplicity, and, if I may: a new tonality. This was in 1960.

Terry Riley and La Monte Young had recently
arrived in New York from Berkeley, California. New York had an
underground loft scene in lower Manhattan at the time, underground
because loft living had not yet been legalized. There dwelled a spicy
mixture of composers, visual artists, choreographers, and poets.
Riley and Young found themselves in the company of artists such as
Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, Walter de Maria and Marian Zazeela, poets
Jackson Mac Low and Diane Wakowski, and the underground film makers
Jack Smith and Tony Conrad (who was also a composer and violinist).

There was also a minimalist movement in
sculpture going on at the time, which without doubt served as an
inspiration for Young and Riley. Whatever the case may have been,
Young was soon playing his sopranino saxophone in the context of a
group he had put together consisting of the composers John Cale on
viola, Tony Conrad on violin, and Angus Maclise on hand percussion.
Young, who along with Riley is commonly acknowledged as having
founded the minimalist school in the field of music, was improvising
seemingly endless and very beautiful modal lines using a circular
breathing technique, while the others provided an accompany drone in
just intonation. Terry Riley at this time was playing concerts of
A Rainbow in Curved Air, his seminal piece for electric organ,
which was treated by the special tape delay techniques pioneered by
Riley. These concerts would typically last from 8 p.m. to sunrise.

By the mid-sixties, Philip Glass and Steve
Reich had arrived on the New York scene and embarked upon further
explorations into the new tonality, Glass with his unique
incorporation of Asiatic process art; Reich with his invention of
"phase music", with which he liberally mixed the rhythmic models he
had learned while studying with master drummers in Ghana. In the
United States alone there were many composers working within the
framework or at the edges of this new tonality, such as Maryanne
Amacher, David Behrman, Tony Conrad, Philip Corner, Daniel Goode,
Julius Eastman, Jon Gibson, Tom Johnson, Petr Kotik, Carmen Moore,
Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel
and James Tenney, as well as the work of composers living on the West
Coast such as Robert Ashley, Harold Budd, Lou Harrison, Terry
Jennings, Pauline Oliveros and "Blue" Gene Tyranny, to name only a
few. An initial gesture of this group of composers and their many
colleagues of the period was to break art music out of the language
and characteristic atonality of the serial school, without regressing
to neoclassicism or romanticism, without reverting to a dead music.

Simultaneous with these new trends in art music
in the United States, exciting developments were occurring in Europe
by the late sixties with the work of groups such as Musica
Electronica Viva and Cornelius Cardew's group AMM. MEV consisted of a
number of expatriate Americans living in Europe - Alvin Curran,
Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and others. Both MEV and AMM
were groups consisting of composers coming out of a classical music
tradition who wanted to break their music away from the fully notated
score. After Cage's use of indeterminacy and Stockhausen's early
attempts at introducing random elements into his scores, it seemed
like the next logical step. This resulted in the musicians of AMM and
MEV working within very loose structures, or no structure at all, to
produce a free music, an immediate music made on the spot as the
spirit moved them. Rzewski later moved back to the United States
where he started a New York version of MEV.

After working with improvisational techniques
for a while, Rzewski and company realized that there was already a
great tradition of improvisation to draw upon in America, namely,
African-American art music. People like Rzewski, Anthony Braxton,
Garrett List, Muhal Richard Abram and Karl Berger were working hard
back then to break down the traditional hierarchical barriers between
music coming out of a Western European classical tradition and
African-American art music. It was wonderful to see composers from
both traditions finally getting together to share ideas.

All this is not to belittle the importance of
the continued exploration and development of so-called "established"
avant-garde new music tendencies. For example, the research into
computer music by John Chowning which brought about the perfection of
FM synthesis; the continuing research of composers such as Max
Mathews; the very exciting musical possibilities created by the
micro-computer, which lead to the invention of interactive software
and a good deal of interesting music by composers who are also
software programmers such as David Behrman, Laurie Spiegel, George
Lewis, Nicolas Collins and Ron Kuivila.

During the seventies there were several issues
which became important to all art music composers, whether they were
continuing to explore new vistas along established roads of musical
thought or were giving birth to completely new styles of music. One
dominating force that moved composers towards tonality and away from
serialism was the very pervasive feeling during the early seventies
that they wanted to reach a wider audience, not so much to increase
their record sales (an eighties notion) as for the reason that,
frankly, they were beginning to feel somewhat isolated. They felt
that art music had become too insular, that they were making music
which only other composers could appreciate. In reading interviews
with various composers during the period spanning the early seventies
up to the middle eighties, one comes across the word "accessibility"
over and over again, statements reading something like, "I want to
make music that is formally rigorous, yet accessible to a wider
audience." It can't be emphasized what an important issue this was to
composers during this period.

Opening their ears to a new tonality and
opening their minds to the possibility of music having greater
accessibility also had the helpful effect of legitimizing, for art
music composers, the music of other cultures and popular music. It is
important to remember that, as late as the sixties, improvisation was
a dirty word in the hallowed halls of the music establishment.
Asiatic Indian classical music and advanced tendencies in jazz were
considered to be feverish, opium-inspired gibberish dreamed up by the
hopelessly confused. There was a very real perception of an
hierarchical pyramid with classical music on the top, "jazz"
somewhere lower down in the middle; of course, in the early sixties,
rock was barely considered music. During the seventies, these notions
began to crumble in the minds of art music composers, classical music
musicians and the general public as they began to realize the
rhythmic and harmonic complexities involved in the performance of a
raga or a melodic line articulated by an improviser such as Charlie
Parker. As a direct result of this, another major item on the agenda
among many art music composers by the mid-seventies was the desire to
do everything possible to tear down the barriers put up by our
society and by academia between the predominately Western art music,
African-American art music, and world music.

Composers responded to this new challenge in
different ways. As mentioned earlier, various composers such as
Young, Riley, Glass and Reich infused energy into their work by
embracing the music of other cultures to combine world music with a
definitively Western vision of the world, to forge a new tonality.
The path Musica Electronica Viva took was to escape the tyranny of
written music by embracing improvisatory techniques of various kinds
and exploding previous notions of musical hierarchy. There was also
as important movement of visual artists, composers, choreographers
and poets called "Fluxus", the musical portion let by composers and
musicians such as Charlotte Moorman, Philip Corner, Yoko Ono and
Daniel Goode, who went even further in rejecting notions of musical
hierarchy: In considering all sound to be beautiful, they went so far
on their agenda as to organize a remarkable series of concerts where
even sensitive non-musicians could take part as performers.

It was against this background that the next
generation of composers was taking careful note of the trails being
blazed away from serialism into the exciting unknown of the new
tonality. The musical climate of the time had facilitated the
smashing of hierarchical barriers separating art music and what was
then generally called "jazz". It hadn't occurred to many composers of
art music that this decimation of barriers could happen with rock
music as well. But then, starting around 1975 or '76, there was an
explosion and regeneration on the rock scene. This explosion happened
globally, with particular focus in the U.K., the USA, Canada, and
what was then known as West Germany.

Section 2

The Late 70s & 80s, A Report from New York City

Music in Crises: A Catastrophe of Meaning.

During the seventies, I was in the thick of
presenting my work on the avant-garde music scene in lower Manhattan,
having in 1971 founded the music program at the Kitchen, which was
then a large loft on Mercer Street in the Soho district of New York
presenting video, music, visual art and dance. After observing what
was happening on the art music scene around 1975 & 76, a number
of composers decided that it would be possible to embrace rock music
and make it their own. Instead of basing their work upon the music
and rhythms of India or Ghana, as composers like Young, Riley, Glass
and Reich had done, and instead of working in an improvisatory
context, as Cardew and Rzewski had done, this new group of composers
decided to do something roughly equivalent in the area of rock. In
New York during the middle seventies, there were composers such as
Laurie Anderson, Peter Gordon and myself working in this fashion,
with "Blue" Gene Tyranny and Paul Dresher working during the same
period in San Francisco, soon to be joined by many others.

That we could do this was only possible because
of the hierarchy-smashing initiated by the previous avant-garde, and,
in a way, it could be said that we were continuing in the spirit of
the modernist investigation into what makes a work of music a work of
music. We continued to ask the question, "Can this too, be considered
art music?" This was not, of course, to imply that rock is not art.
The question we were addressing was how far could we go in
incorporating the rhythms, sounds, and working methods of rock into
art music before turning it completely into rock.

During this period art music composers weren't
the only musicians pushing at the boundaries of their fields. Tearing
down the walls of the music establishment was very much in the air.
Composers such as Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy Jenkins were
teaching serial technique to their composer friends at the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (A.A.C.M.)
schoolhouse in Chicago. They were busy incorporating these techniques
into the techniques of improvisation. Rock was pushing its boundaries
to the limits, too. By 1980 it had became common practice for rock
groups to incorporate noise into their sound palette, not as a mere
effect, but as the whole piece! Groups such as Teenage Jesus and the
Jerks, Contortions, DNA, and early Swans come to mind with regard to
this. In New York the art world was embracing the new rock, it got to
the point where it seemed that half the visual art world was going to
the clubs, and the other half were actually in the groups!

The breakdown of barriers separating the genres
of art music, improvised music, and rock was complete. Composers such
as Oliver Lake were playing in performance venues that had previously
been reserved strictly for art music or rock; art music composers
such as myself were playing at CBGB's and the Mudd Club; we had rock
composers such as Brian Eno making sound installations for art
galleries. To use the three of us as examples, each was operating in
our secondary context at this time as a kind of "secret agent": there
was a definite feeling that we were transgressing in some way when we
effected a switch of context. It was still necessary for us to
"infiltrate" the venues of our secondary context. It must be
remembered that when what was then called "jazz" was first programmed
at the Kitchen in the middle seventies, it caused considerable
outrage among members of the art music community. The same thing
happened when avant-garde rock was programmed there at the end of the
seventies, except this time it was an uproar from both the art and
jazz communities. But by the middle eighties, there was no longer
this feeling of transgression.It had become the norm, to the point
where music producers at alternative art spaces and festivals
appeared to be putting on variety shows rather than concerts of
serious music.

The downfall of musical hierarchy had an
initial effect of greatly enriching the music of all who
participated. Improvised music began to be informed by aleatory
techniques and "open" structures; we saw art music informed by
improvisatory techniques and rock gesture; we saw rock composers
working with ideas drawn from minimalist music and the classical
avant-garde. Sometimes this was done consciously by the composers
involved, and sometimes not. We who had worked to tear the walls of
the academy down and break with the status quo had created a
situation where the ideas associated with our various musical
factions were up for grabs. While this had the effect of liberating
composers from the ideological frameworks that had previously
shackled them, it also led to a great deal of confusion among
producers, critics, and composers themselves as to what this new
music was actually supposed to be.

The amazing thing about the first half of the
eighties in New York was that art music, improvised music, and rock
had reached a point where the formal issues endemic to each nearly
perfectly coincided, to such an extent that art music made by art
composers in a rock context was rock music; where improvised music
made by improvisers in an art music context was art music; where
improvised music made by rock composers in a jazz festival context
was warmly welcomed by the jazz audience. And this wasn't because the
composers changed the music depending on the context. We were all
doing what we would normally do. We were at a unique intersection in
the formal development and evolution of our respective fields where
what we played in venues and for audiences outside our primary
context happened to work. However, the fact remains that the
traditions, the histories, and the formal issues of each of the
genres of music are very different. Each was growing at its own pace,
and by the end of the eighties, they had gone their separate ways.

To augment the confusion, many of the composers
were adamant about not categorizing their music. The romantic notion
went something like this: an improviser is a rock musician is an art
composer is an improviser, etc. While this was an understandable
position to take in view of the increased number of venues it enabled
one to play in and the resulting higher revenues it brought the
composer/performers, it didn't make much formal sense. One couldn't
expect cutting-edge music to stay stuck in that limbo forever and
indeed it didn't. In the meantime, critics who were rock or jazz
specialists were put in the unfortunate position of having to try to
say something intelligent and meaningful about art music composers
whose background and musical heritage they either despised or knew
nothing about. Classical music critics who could barely hear the
difference between John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, or for that
matter between Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, were put in the position
of reviewing improvisers and rock composers. The onus of blame for
this situation cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the critic.
If the art music composer bills his work as rock, it had better be
rock and address the formal concerns, latest sample or drum sound
current in rock that year. If the improviser or rock composer bills
himself as an art music composer, he had better know his art music
history and his work had better stand up to its formal concerns,
addressing issues relevant to the present, not to issues fully
explored 20 or 30 years ago, (or in the case of at least one
infiltrator of the art music scene, formal issues fully explored in
the l9th century.)

Those musicians who've worked in a number of
contexts have learned during the eighties that if one decides to be a
rock composer, there is one set of formal issues at work; if one
decides to work in the art music field, there's another. While it is
certainly possible and indeed desirable in many instances to skirt
the fringes of both fields, one eventually must make a choice
regarding which set of issues to address in order to do any serious
work in either. Anyone who says otherwise is being either cynical or
naive. This doesn't mean that one must bow to the prevailing musical
practice in one's field, but in order to challenge, bend, or break
the rules, one must first know what those rules are. To do
exceptional work within a given field, one must absolutely focus on
that field.

At the start of the eighties there was no
single agenda in New York City for new music. We were a group of
composers who had come variously out of the rock, improvising, and
art music communities of the seventies who met as fellow infiltrators
during the eighties to form a highly factious community consisting of
separate musical tendencies with widely varying positions of
advocacy. Things have greatly evolved since then. At the beginning of
the nineties, even though our music still sounds vastly different, a
common agenda has finally emerged.

In the paragraphs following, I would like to
cover the progression of ideas that led up to the current agenda for
art music. I will make no attempt at an in-depth analysis of the work
of my colleagues on the principle that it is better to outline my own
musical adventure of the eighties, which I can do with some
authority, and leave it to the other composers to describe in detail
theirs.

My Own Musical Adventure of the Eighties: A Ten Year Project in
the Field.

At the end of the sixties, I was making
electronically-generated music whose vocabulary consisted entirely of
overtones and pitches tuned in just intonation. I had been trained as
a harpsichord tuner and had tuned La Monte Young's Well-Tuned
Piano for him during my student days, so tuning the pitches by
ear in my pieces was a relatively simple procedure for me. My music
evolved from this starting point. I was a hard-core minimalist and
was experimenting with non-notated music of various sorts at that
point. This led to my interest in improvisation and my work with
Frederic Rzewski's group, MEV NY, which eventually led to my playing
flute and reeds with the Charles Lee Redman Trio for three years, an
improvisatory ensemble consisting of Garrett List on trombone, Jon
Deak on acoustic bass, and Jim Burton on various noise-producing,
largely home-made instruments. The "jazz loft" scene was in full
swing in New York at this time. By the middle seventies New York was
saturated with improvised music. I grew tired of it and searched for
something else.

I took a look at the various musical strains
prevalent on the art music scene in New York at that time: composers
such as La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine were working with
music in just intonation, Philip Glass was pioneering process music,
Steve Reich was exploring the implications of phase music, and
Frederic Rzewski was weighing the differences between notated and
non-notated music. It was around this time I went to hear my first
rock concert at CBGB's, it was the Ramones. While hearing them, I
realized that, as a minimalist, I had more in common with this music
than I thought. I was attracted by the sheer energy and raw power of
the sound as well as chord progressions which were not dissimilar to
some of the process music I had been hearing at the time.

The next step was to determine how I was going
to integrate this music into my own. I didn't want merely to
appropriate it, to filch from a form of music without actively
engaging its source. Actively engaging a music's source implies that
one has a knowledge and thorough understanding of one's source
material. If I attempted to integrate rock into my music without
understanding it, I realized I would have a music that would
imperfectly represent rock, that I would risk making a shallow
representation of it, a mistake I have seen arrogant art music
composers make when they quote from their own highly subjective and
often primitive notion of what popular music is. Any musical form is
a field of knowledge that can be apprehended, given time and effort.
I realized that the only way to truly integrate my music with rock
was to be able to play it myself. In view of this, I undertook the
study of the electric guitar.

In all fairness, it must be said that I, too,
had a fairly arrogant attitude as I first approached the study of
rock. I had very few insecurities as a classical musician, so I
thought, "I've been a musician all my life, I've played Pierre
Boulez's Sonatine for Flute and Piano and I know how to count
to four, so this ought to be easy."

As it happened, things didn't turn out that
way. I started playing with a band and got to a point where I was
playing bar chords and even doing a bit of soloing, but my playing
was stiff, very stiff. I was counting the rhythms in my head rather
than really feeling them. In addition, one of the formal concerns on
the rock scene in New York was whether you were "posing" or not. I
clearly wasn't a rocker, yet there I was, playing in rock venues.
That was called posing. The general feeling on the "punk" scene then
was that if you were going to be a rocker, you ought at least to have
tattoos on your arm, preferably with a hypodermic needle sticking out
of one of them. Since I didn't fit into this model, I went through a
huge existential crisis with regard my composing: "Am I going to be a
rocker, or what?"

So I switched bands and spent a full year
playing guitar with a rock group called Arsenal until I got the
feeling of the music and its rhythms. It wasn't until after this
"field work" that I felt comfortable enough to make a piece, a
composition in the classical sense. With my background as a
minimalist, my experience as a harpsichord tuner, and with the rock
music I loved, I composed a piece in 1977 that made use of everything
I was as a composer and musician.

The piece was called Guitar Trio, for
three electric guitars, electric bass, and drums. Two of the guitars
were in more or less standard tunings and one of the guitars was
tuned to all low E strings. The melodic content drew upon the musical
vocabulary I had worked with on the classical avant-garde scene in
New York and consisted entirely of the overtone series generated by
the E string of the electric guitar. The rhythmic thrust and the way
the musicians played together came out of the rock tradition. To my
knowledge, it was the first composition to make use of
multiple-electric guitars to merge the extended-time, overtone-based
music of the sixties and seventies with serious hard rock.

I did not want to be a classical composer
quot;appropriating" an aboriginal form to satisfy my personal musical
cravings. It was important to me then as it is now that I not play my
rock-influenced pieces exclusively in art spaces. After all the
Fluxus experimentation of the sixties and seventies, I knew that
whatever I played in an art space would be accepted on some level.
Art music composers were concerned with getting their music out of
the ivy-covered tower of the university and insular environment of
the alternative art space. I wanted to be able to play Guitar Trio
and subsequent pieces in bona-fide rock clubs. So I formed an
ensemble and we started playing at CBGB's and Max's, where a rock
group would last on stage for perhaps three minutes if the audience
thought the music was not rock.

As it turned out, the audiences at the clubs
thought, "Jesus, most punk bands can play at least two chords, this
band only plays one!" But they liked it. People would come back to
the sound board to ask our engineer where we were hiding the singers.
The overtones and harmonics we were playing rang out with such
clarity that the audiences actually thought they were hearing
vocalists. This made me happy because it meant I was succeeding in
what I wanted to do: to make music that could be understood even
without a Master's degree in 20th century music composition, but
which, as the saying goes, wouldn't melt in your hands if you did! It
was very important to the group of composers I had been working with
in the seventies that we be able to play our music in a rock context,
because otherwise we would be operating in a cultural vacuum.

Although it was true that I considered myself
an art music composer working with a rock instrumentation in a rock
context (making music which I insisted was art music), the fact of
the matter was that my music at this time was not "not rock". The
point of interest was that the signification of my pieces radically
changed depending on the audience and context I was playing in, even
though the music we played for each was virtually the same. For
example, I had made a piece in 1980 entitled Drastic
Classicism for four electric guitars, electric bass, and drums.
The guitars were in special, dissonant tunings in just intonation;
dissonant both in relation to themselves and to each other. Because a
good deal of the melodic movement in Drastic Classicism rested
with the higher overtones generated by the electric guitars, and
because these overtones are rather soft, the musicians in my ensemble
tended to turn their guitar amplifiers up to obscenely high levels of
sound in order to reinforce the amplitude of the higher harmonics.
This poetic gesture was interpreted in different ways, depending on
who was doing the listening.

For an art music audience, both Guitar
Trio and Drastic Classicism were vigorous new strains of
overtone-based minimalism, lyrical in content and structurally
austere, which synthesized two different musics to arrive at a
striking new form. On the other hand, in a rock context, I can say
with considerable pride that Drastic Classicism was one of the
pieces which inspired the noise-rock movement. The sonority of
Drastic was so complex that what the musicians in my ensemble
were hearing as a kind of viscous, gelatinous sphere of shimmering
overtones, the rock community heard as an ear shattering
wall-of-sound. At first I wasn't sure I liked this characterization
of what I was doing, but then I realized Guitar Trio and
Drastic Classicism were compositions which told a story to the
listener, but somehow it was the listener's story. Everyone heard the
pieces in a different way. I hadn't started out with the intention of
invoking the time-hallowed rock tradition of aurally assaulting an
audience, but I gradually grew comfortable with the idea. Since I was
evidently taking the use of noise in rock to new extremes, I decided
to let the label stick for the time being.

I wasn't the only composer who was switching
contexts between art music and rock. It was happening constantly and
in both directions. For example, Robert Fripp had made a
concert-length piece with sophisticated distortion techniques for
electric guitar, combined with the tape-delay techniques developed by
Terry Riley in the sixties. Robert Ashley and Blue Gene Tyranny had
made a video-opera, which made heavy use of rock rhythms and
delightfully sleazy cocktail-room piano music. David Byrne had made a
piece for brass ensemble, commissioned by Robert Wilson, the theater
director. Established art music composers such as Maryanne Amacher,
Harold Budd, David Behrman, and Jon Hassel were playing their music
at rock venues such as the infamous Mudd Club in lower Manhattan.
Glenn Branca, a former actor turned rock musician, was making daring
forays into art and classical contexts. Peter Gordon, who had studied
composition at Mills College and U.C. San Diego, had established the
Love of Life Orchestra in New York by the mid-seventies, which was
one of the first bands, if not the first band, to bridge the gap
between the rock and art music communities of the seventies. Laurie
Anderson, a talented visual and conceptual artist, was successfully
playing in art music spaces as a composer/performer. This is a mere
sampling of the activity that was going on at the time. It was an
exciting period. I watched with great interest the musical results of
these crossovers, and after a time, came to a number of conclusions
with regard to their merit.

A case in point would be the Fripp piece. Fripp
himself had no idea the tape-delay techniques he was using originated
with Terry Riley, thinking that it was Brian Eno who developed them.
And anyway, what did it matter? The work that Fripp was doing had
never before been done in a rock context and only could have been
arrived at by someone who had worked extensively in the rock field.
This affirms my point of how each genre of music has its separate
evolution, that what is revolutionary in one could very well be old
news to another. The early work that AMM, MEV, and the Scratch
Orchestra had done with improvisatory techniques was vitally
important to the development of the classical field, yet perhaps was
treading familiar ground to musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Don
Cherry.

This is not to attack the work of composers
honestly trying to push their respective fields of endeavor to new
heights, but almost every crossover piece I've heard (by classical
composers claiming to be doing rock, by rock composers attempting to
work within a classical context) are failures, not as a
things-in-themselves, but when judged against the prevailing issues
current in the composer's secondary context. That is why I have never
called myself a rock composer, even though the music I made during
the seventies and eighties was not "not rock". I have too much
respect for the form. The musical issues I addressed in my pieces
always related to the classical avant-garde, not to rock. Rock has
its own history and technique. African-American art music also has an
incredibly rich tradition and history, so does avant-garde classical
music. We've realized that each of these genres of music has its own
formal concerns which take a while to master.

By the mid-eighties, questions concerning
accessibility and context no longer concerned composers who were at
the cutting edge in New York. At the start of the seventies, a
composer playing at a performance venue such as the Kitchen would be
lucky if 15 people showed up to the concert. By the middle eighties,
the place was consistently packed. After all the records sold by
Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Jon Hassel, and Harold Budd,
there was no longer any doubt that art music could reach a wider
audience, when and if it had the inclination to do so. The point had
been proved. As for hierarchical questions, the musical
intelligentsia in New York had completed their project of decimating
musical and racial barriers between the genres of music, which left
us free to focus on the music we were making itself.

As a kind of background noise to the agitated
din and musical ferment of the early eighties, we musicians and
composers gradually became aware of a new agenda for music that was
in the process of being formed that was radically different from the
issues we were working on in the sixties and seventies. This agenda
came to no single composer as a gift from the muse in a sudden flurry
of enlightenment. It was something that dawned on many of us slowly
at an almost subliminal level, revealing itself by degrees as we
concurrently worked to bring our other projects to completion. At the
beginning of the eighties, the tenets of this agenda were blurred, to
say the least. A number of us set out to get beyond this myopic haze.
The only way to do this was by trial and error. Each of our pieces
became a means of answering a question, a way of unraveling a few of
the twisted strands barring our way to true musical revelation.

In 1980, I was part of a circle consisting of
visual artists Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Michael Zwack, Troy
Brantuch, Richard Prince, video artist Ed Bowes and Michel Auder, art
critic Roselee Goldberg, and the performance artist Eric Bogosian.
Robert Longo was also a talented electric guitarist and played with
my ensemble in 1979 and 80. He had made an evocative series of slides
entitled Pictures for Music, (1979) which slowly dissolved,
one into the other, to be projected behind the band when we played
Guitar Trio (1977).

After many dinner table conversations with
Longo, I realized that we were struggling with the same issues. The
generation directly before Longo's consisted of artists such as Vito
Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, and John Baldessari, who were conceptual
artists. Longo and his generation had come of age on abstract and
conceptual art. Reacting against this, they brought realism back on
the canvas. One of the issues he and his colleagues were dealing with
was representation versus appropriation. Longo and I belonged to that
generation of baby boomers who grew up saturated by mass-media
consciousness: spoon-fed on TV shows and transistor radios,
snapshots, home movies, and Life Magazine. So it seemed
perfectly natural for us to use images and sounds commonly found in
the electronic media as subject matter for our work. The question was
whether to simply appropriate from the media, as Andy Warhol had done
with his famous soup cans and Brillo boxes, or to "represent" them,
to allow them to pass through a kind of personal filter, thus
impressing the personal stamp of the artist and his comment on
society on the objet d'art.

The questions that Longo was posing sounded
very much like the ones I was working on with Guitar Trio and
subsequent pieces composed between 1977-81, posed in different
language; naturally, I was intrigued.

Through my discussions with Longo and
subsequent readings of art and literary criticism, I began to think
of the work I had done with my electric guitar ensemble as a
representation of rock, that I was representing the spectacle and
sound of rock in the manner of a visual artist representing an image
taken from the electronic media. In other words, my ensemble was a
representation of a rock band, rather than actually "being" a rock
band. To be able to accurately represent something implies that one
is intimately familiar with the object being represented. By this
time, none of the musicians in my ensemble, myself included, were
strangers to the rock scene or its methods of producing sound. By
1980, I was immersed in the music of rock as well the life-style of
its night-life, which is what finally enabled me to work freely as an
art music composer embracing a vocabulary coming out of rock.

By 1982, after making a number of
rock-influenced compositions in this style, I wanted to make a new
series of pieces involving the use of representation in music. I had
never planned on devoting my entire career to composing for a rock
instrumentation. There were already so many composers around whose
idea of making art was to take one good idea and regurgitate it for
the rest of their working lives, a practice I had no intention of
emulating. In short, I was getting bored. Composers from both the
rock and art music fields had started to imitate or build upon the
work I had pioneered, which I considered flattering, albeit alarming
at times. Since I didn't feel inclined to stick around to "defend my
place in history", I was free to move on to something else.

I had succeeded with the guitar band in
combining minimalist tendencies in music with rock. Now I wanted to
try combining other elements. To be on the safe side, I decided to
work with music I was familiar with for this experiment. I had been
through a musical journey which brought me through the stark lands of
minimalism, the rhythmic and harmonic sophistication of improvised
music, and finally to the sheer, raw power of the rock. I couldn't
help but wonder what would happen if I distilled the essential
elements of all three into a single composition.

In doing this, I decided to highlight the
differences between notated and non-notated music by having both
elements appear concurrently on a vertical plane. I had been wanting
to write a piece for brass octet for years, so I decided to score a
piece for 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, and trap set. A friend of
mine, the composer and trombonist George Lewis, contracted the
musicians for me. They were all well known players who were both
improvisers and excellent readers. I asked Anton Fier, a fine drummer
who was a cult figure on the downtown scene, to provide the rock
element. This piece, For Brass (1982), had been commissioned
by the Groupe de Recherche Choréographique de l'Opéra
de Paris, who told me that they wanted a tape.

For reasons of conscience as well as
aesthetics, I have always been opposed to the notion of ballet
companies using tapes of music that could be played by live
musicians. In order to get around this, I decided to make the
composition so that the only way to realize the piece would be to
record it. This turned out to be an easy thing to do with brass
instruments. The trumpet in particular and brass instruments in
general are difficult instruments to master and play. The players'
lips tire easily and one doesn't write too many high notes without
leaving sufficient rest in between. So I decided to make a piece with
virtually no rests in between long passages with high notes. In the
studio we would record one section at a time, punching the musicians
in after each break so as not to "bust their chops", an occupational
hazard among brass players. The brass section, composed of people who
were acknowledged masters of their instruments to begin with, sounded
doubly good. The effect could be described as a cross between The
Theater of Eternal Music and a Broadway Musical gone wild. I was
pleased with the result.

During the recording of For Brass, I had
instructed Anton Fier to play a 120 bar, slowly-building drum solo
coming out of the quiet section of the piece. We worked on the solo
together, taking advantage of an overdubbing technique in the
recording studio. When I asked Fier to add an additional snare drum
track, the overall effect sounded a bit like a marching band. This
gave me the idea for my next piece.

I had been an ardent serialist during my
student days, but once I became involved with the minimalist
movement, I was working primarily with forms of non-notated music. I
felt an urge to return to notated music, to explore the differences
and tensions possible between the two. In interviews, I've often been
asked questions such as, "What is the difference in the way you
think, if you are working with notated or non-notated music? Are you
working more with structure when you write it out?" It's not a
question of structure; to say a piece of music is non-notated isn't
to say that its form is aimless. Most composers I know who work with
non-notated or otherwise "open" forms of music do so within very
elaborate structural frameworks; some of the work of the composer
Earl Brown, and a good deal of the work of Elliott Sharp and John
Zorn come to mind with regard to this.

The difference between notated and non-notated
music centers on the different approach each has to working with
musical content. For example, Guitar Trio could be fully
notated, but it would lose something in the process. The piece had
been made in such a way that it could only be played by musicians
with extensive rock experience. Guitar Trio has a formal
structure, but the method of musicians working together parallels
rock. I played my melodic line on guitar the same way every time,
inviting the other guitarists to invent their own lines to go with
what I was playing within the framework of the piece's use of the
overtones as a melodic line. Once we arrived at something which
satisfied everyone, the piece was set. Of course, the parts could be
fully notated, but then the piece would sound stiff. While many
guitarists from New York have played Guitar Trio at one time
or another, Karen Haglof and Robert Poss of the Band of Susans are
the guitarists I've been working with for the past six years who play
this piece. If the parts were notated, it would lose the creative
edge that Robert and Karen give it.

On the other hand, there is music which
absolutely must be notated. After I had made the recording of For
Brass, I asked Fier and another drummer friend, James Lo of Live
Skull, to get together with me in a rehearsal studio. We tried to
"improvise" martial music. The result was a total flop. The precision
involved when playing the intricate unison parts of martial music
necessitates its notation. What I learned from this experience was
that while most improvised music would sound ridiculously stiff if it
was sight-read off a score, the reverse is also true: there are many
musical ideas whose birth into the world can come only by means of
strict notational procedures. And as the French horn player Pascal
Pongy once told the composer Gavin Bryars, "The moment music is
written it is playable."

I did some research into martial music
notation. Marching band drummers have an exotic lexicon of musical
terms such as flam-taps, double-paradiddles, tap 9's, tap 7's,
thirteen-stroke rolls, eleven-stroke rolls, etc., etc. I learned them
all and wrote a number of pieces for brass and battery. The most
successful, and perhaps the funniest, is called Waterloo No. 2
(1984) for solo percussionist, two trumpets or flugelhorns, and two
optional trombones and optional piccolo. I have always had a soft
spot in my heart for process music. I thought I might have an
interesting result if I subjected the drum solo to a logically
evolving series of additive processes and cyclic structures. The
harmonic vocabulary of the trumpets was generic minimalist, which I
decided to spice up by turning the melodic lines into an exhaustive
inquiry into the true nature of the half-cadence. The result was a
humorous music which I was at first tempted to call "Phil Glass Meets
the Marching Band"; I even put a little tag on the end that was a
direct quote from Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air in order to
give credit where credit was due.

This was the first time I consciously decided
to use incompatible elements, combining them not as a pastiche of
ideas, but to arrive at a cohesive new meaning and altered musical
signification. Actually, this is what I had been doing all along,
since 1977, with my first piece in this genre, Guitar Trio,
but the impetus of my earlier pieces came as a result of the
contextual questions of the time, to answer the question of the
avant-garde of the fifties: "Can this, too, be music?". With
Waterloo No. 2, I realized that this was not the question any
of my pieces since Guitar Trio had been addressing. The work of the
modernist movement in general and of John Cage and the artists in the
Fluxus movement in particular had finally freed us of our bondage to
the academy, the museum, and the musical establishment. The
avant-garde question had permutated into the post-modern question:
"Now that we have this freedom, what do we want to use it for?"

This question was being addressed by virtually
all of my colleagues at the beginning of the eighties, although often
on an unconscious level. Most were using the liberties granted by the
previous modernist project to arrive at a personal music, only to
stay within the framework of its scope. As a direct result, many who
had previously been grouped together as post-minimalists were now
making music that could barely be identified as coming out of the
same school, which I thought was a wonderful state of affairs. On the
other hand, I felt that to linger on only one form of musical
composition precluded the possibility of a full investigation into
the post-modern question. Rather than using our freedom to define a
personal playing style or mode of music in order to etch out a
harmonic or melodic vocabulary that would immediately be
identifiable, and incidentally, salable; I felt it would be more
interesting to directly explore the nature of this freedom to
determine how far I could push it by composing a series of pieces,
greatly varied in style, which would be about directly addressing the
implications of the question, "Now that we are liberated from the
academy and from asking whether what we do is art or not, what are we
going to do with this freedom?" I wanted to try to find radical new
forms through a process of distillation.

A good example would be my 40 minute piece for
solo piano called Echo Solo. Since I had already experimented
with combining popular forms with art music, I wanted to see what
would happen if I used a diverse vocabulary exclusively drawn from
the last classical avant-garde. Accordingly, I tuned a MIDI-piano in
a special, home-brewed system of just intonation and determined the
pitch and dynamic selection by a combination of serial technique and
chance operations. While all these techniques have been common enough
over the past few decades, it's only now that current musical
practice allows us to combine them. Ten years ago, to apply serial
technique and chance operations to the choice of pitch in a
composition for a piano tuned in just intonation would have been
considered a hopeless contradiction in terms: today, it's an
interesting paradox.

Another composer taking wildly disparate
musical ideas and putting them into the framework of one composition
is John Zorn. In a typical piece of his, Spillane for example, the
music might open with an ear splitting scream, fading into soothing
movie music, fading into some cheesy cocktail piano, fading into
sampled strings. At first the musical ideas seem to have nothing to
do with each other, but as the music continues, one hears a logic in
its formal construction. The musical result is exciting, beautiful,
and often humorous. However, there is a fundamental difference
between our music. While I also work with disparate musical ideas, my
music, since Guitar Trio, has always integrated them in a vertical,
rather than horizontal, fashion. For example, in my Souvenirs
d'enfance (1990) for two flutes, I work with ideas coming out of
the minimalist, pointillist, and French impressionist periods,
weaving them so tightly together that only the tiniest pair of
critical scissors could isolate the various elements. Comparing my
work and the work of Zorn's, we hear two musics, post-modern: one a
music of contrast and timing, the other a music of synthesis and
amalgamation.

This is not to say that amalgamation or the
contrasting of disparate ideas is the only way to make music in the
l990's. Composers are now finding many ways to take advantage of
their musical liberation. In the fifties, much of our art was an art
of transgression, an art which broke us away from the restrictions of
the academy or museum. In the 90's, however, art music composers
coming out of a classical tradition are free to make full use of the
musical vocabulary available to them, whether from the other genres
of music and music of the world, or finding new applications for the
ideas of composers of the past, to combine them in way previously
impossible or unthought of.

The tendency among those composers whose music
juxtaposes and contrasts appropriated sounds or musical styles,
stringing them together to make a musical composition, can be
considered a tentative first step toward working with the forms now
available to us. However, when a composer takes music out of one
context and puts it into another, unless he first puts the music
through extensive personal filtering, he runs the risk of the music
being merely "kitsch", which Clement Greenberg had defined in 1939 as
"the production of high art for the easy consumption of the new urban
industrial masses" and mass-mediated culture. And even in those few
instances when this work method does manage to get beyond being
kitsch, the formal issues addressed in this style were already
explored by composers such as Cage, Brown, Kagel, Subotnick,
Stockhausen, and Wolff in the 1950s and 60s.

In Fontana Mix (1958), John Cage used
magnetic tape splicing techniques to make a composition using sounds
appropriated from 78 rpm and 33 rpm long-playing recordings, the
radio, and through the use of the microphone. Karlheinz Stockhausen
used similar techniques to make a composition whose source material
was based on the national anthems of many countries throughout the
world, called Hymnen (1969). Both composers avoided the risk
of simply making a collage or pastiche of appropriated sounds by so
thoroughly altering the concrete sounds they were quoting that the
focus was on the composition, rather than its imported components. In
relying on the "kitsch" value of an appropriated sound, the composer
runs a high risk of the joke becoming stale after its initial shock
value has worn off.

No one is saying, least of all us, that it was
wrong for composers working in the 1980s to base their music on a
project initiated in the 50s; on the contrary, it is often useful to
borrow from ideas of the past, building upon them in the light of
current musical practice. However, the point must be made that this
particular method of music making only begins to scratch the surface
of what is possible for composers to do at the dawn of the nineties;
we can now take present notions of musical form and content to
extremes never before dreamed possible.

My personal formula for musical inquiry begins
by taking a close look at a number of different musics and studying
them, considering what would happen if I modulated their
signification through a process of amalgamation and superimposition.
What I attempt to determine is how to best use the new sounds and
forms available to us in a way that isn't mere appropriation through
digital sampling or analog extraction, but that directly engages
their source in a way which transcends original musical meaning while
at the same time imploding it, to such a degree that meaning is no
longer possible or even desirable, but rather exactly the reverse: to
initiate a rite of decimation of musical meaning and thought in order
to partake of the fascination which results from daring such a thing.

Re-examining the ideas of composers from this
century, or previous ones, implies looking back to the past for
inspiration, which carries with it the danger of regression. Without
the modernist project, we wouldn't have arrived at our present point
in art music and the freedoms it has given us. Our task is to build
upon modernism, not to pretend it never existed. There are two types
of post-modernisms in the art world today: the good kind, and the bad
kind. The "bad" post-modernism rejects, or is completely ignorant of,
the modernist project. It wants to go back into the past and stay
there. During his presidency, it could be said that Ronald Reagan was
this type of post-modernist. Through the laws he enacted and the
judges he appointed to the United States Supreme Court and Federal
judiciary, he attempted, and might very well yet succeed, in turning
back the clock on civil rights, many social issues, the right to
privacy, and the right to choice for women. He wanted to erase the
progress we had made on social issues during the sixties, he
addressed America's current crises of identity by looking backward,
toward a better, nostalgic past. There are certain groups of visual
artists, choreographers, composers and musicians, who, either through
ignorance or cynicism, attempt the equivalent in art, for whom
nothing is more important than the liquidation of the modernist
project, which had always been a threat to them. Art music composers
have been fighting for complete musical freedom since the 1890's. Now
that we have it, what are we going to use it for? To directly revert
to the romantic period? Of course not! To do that would be to
regress, to go backwards in time, to sleepwalk through history.

Another ensnarement is that of simple
ignorance. It is shocking how many so-called composers of art music
are working in New York alone with only the vaguest notion of the
musical endeavor that preceded them. Partly as an unintended side
result of the liberal climate created by the Fluxus movement, which,
radically at the time, suggested that even non-musicians could be
composers, and partly because of the wide musical horizon and
expanded freedom we now enjoy, there is a generation of would-be
composers who came of age during the eighties who are unacquainted
with the musical history that allows them to make their work. How can
anyone hope to make work of lasting value in our field without
understanding and being fully conversant with the previous
investigations of our composers? Whereas musicians working in the
rock field must stay within its boundaries or run the risk of their
music no longer being rock, one of the aims of art music has been to
decimate previously defined notions of musical meaning. How can an
art music composer do this if he isn't familiar with issues explored
thirty, a hundred, or two-hundred years ago?

The Late Eighties: l990

The modernist project of this century was
concluded, give or take a few years, during the sixties with the
phenomenon of minimalism, the apogee of modernism, which succeeded in
deconstructing music to its basic signifiers: a beat, a chord, a
sound. The music of the seventies heralded the beginning of the
post-modern period, though few of its composers ever thought of what
they were doing as being "post-modern". We simply called our music
"new music" back then, before the term was appropriated by the
independent record industry in America. The rhythm of inquiry in art
music proceeds at a slower rate than the rhythm of fashion music,
which must acquiesce to the demands of capital and the commercial
sector. Once the modernist movement in music was fully decoded, after
intuiting the implications of this decoding, art music composers
devoted themselves to the task of spending the next ten to fifteen
years exploring the possibilities they alluded to, making many and
widely varying musics in an attempt to find a new musical platform
and agenda through the simple method of trial and error. Or to use
the art critic Hal Foster's term, composers commenced the project of
re-coding their music.

The seventies saw an opening up on the part of
art music composers to the music of other cultures and popular music.
This investigation into music basically alien to them was not
accomplished overnight, but by the late eighties, it had become
common practice for an art music composer coming out of a classical
tradition to embrace the rhythms and sounds of a popular music such
as rock, to the point where it seemed that every student of a
composer such as Pierre Boulez or Elliot Carter had his or her own
personal rock group; where composers such as Tod Machover were
writing rock-influenced compositions at the Paris-based IRCAM.

It has become clear by now that the main thrust
of musical investigation at the beginning of the nineties is to make
use of the freedoms implied by the post-modern agenda, to make a
conscious rather than subliminal effort to use the new musical forms
and extended vocabulary available to us, and to launch an
investigation into the nature of this freedom itself. This is not to
say that continuing investigations into earlier musical questions are
not important as well. Most composers I know, myself included, have
many projects and vestiges of questions left unanswered from the
eighties that must be brought to conclusion before devoting all our
energy to the current musical project. However, one current fallacy
which should be dispensed with as soon as possible is that of musical
pluralism. Musical pluralism was the direct result of the decimating
of boundaries between the genres during the seventies and early
eighties, which resulted in much exciting music; but by the late
eighties, pluralism was having the effect of clouding the musical
issues composers needed to address rather than clarifying them. The
formal issues and concerns of art music coming out of a classical
context, African-American art music, and avant-garde rock, which had
converged during the late seventies and early eighties, had now gone
their separate ways. During the nineties, while musical cohabitation
continues to be possible and even desirable, we need to circumscribe
and crisply redefine each of the fields of music, precisely because
the questions being scrutinized in each are not the same. It is now
self-defeating to have ambiguous and murky borders between musical
genre.

This essay makes no attempt to define a musical
agenda for the fields of African-American art music or avant-garde
rock. However, for art music coming out of a classical context, the
path is now clear for a very exciting period of musical
investigation. The following section defines several possible avenues
of research for the coming years, based on knowledge gleaned from the
decade past.

Section 3: Toward a Musical Agenda for the 90's and Beyond.

The classic aesthetic question simply asked,
"What can be said to be beautiful?"; the modern aesthetic question
asked, "What can be said to be art?"; the post-modern question asks,
"What can be said to be beautiful?"; but with one difference (to
quote Cage quoting D. T. Suzuki): "Our feet are a little bit off the
ground". Each project that is modern went through a period of being
post-modern.

Musical freedom, as with political freedom, has
been the exception rather than the rule in the history of mankind.
After centuries upon centuries of political tyranny of various sorts,
the concept of equality and freedom of speech as fundamental human
rights remain fragile. One must remember that documents such as the
French Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen or the
United States' Bill of Rights have only been in existence in
Western society for the past few hundred years, since the 18th
century period of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason. After generations
of vassalage and servitude, these rights are not to be taken for
granted. Even today, it is sobering to note that it would be
impossible for our music and art to survive under such oppressive
governments as now exist in Iran, China, Syria, and more recently in
Algeria. We have seen the outrage to Western precepts of free speech
and national sovereignty wrought upon the author Salman Rushdie, a
British subject, who was forced into hiding when a murderous
theocratic government illegally imposed the death sentence upon him
for writing a book which they decided offended their religious
sensibilities, proving once again that the pen is mightier than the
sword. What kind of musical freedom would we enjoy in medieval
societies such as these? How easy would it be to make the music we
want in countries such as Ethiopia, Cambodia, or Liberia, whose
class, tribal, and economic struggles rule out the possibility of
working on anything else. It is only in an evolved society that we
can begin to position advanced ideas in art on the same level as
advanced ideas in technology and science; to have the luxury of
putting as much value on the development of aesthetics as on the
development of the weapons of war. At the dawn of the nineties, we
find ourselves with unprecedented liberty to explore whatever musical
direction we wish; we must hasten to take advantage of this because
we may very well be in a golden age for development of musical
thought, a period not unlike that of the ancient Greece of the
classical age. We must immediately avail ourselves of the new
intellectual tools provided us; the present golden age, as with the
one which occurred in Greece so long ago, may not be again repeated
for another two millennia.

To return to the present, the seventies and
eighties saw a focus on how different genres of music were similar:
Now, among other things, our task is to focus on how they are
different. Unfortunately, accessibility in art music has led to an
epidemic of musical conservatism within its boundaries. What started
as a reaching out gesture to a wider public by its composers has
ultimately resulted in causing a tremendous pressure on these same
composers to make music that can be easily deciphered by a general
audience. This is a pressure which must be resisted and fought
against during this decade. We mustn't be seduced into letting our
music be dictated to by the marketplace simply because of a perceived
desire from the public for an art music they can immediately grasp.
If easy listening is what they really want, let them go to the new
age section of their record shops!

Theoretically, we in the field of art music
have no restricting definitions imposed upon us by anyone. However,
in spite of the traditional practice of 20th century composers of
European derived Western art music to break out of confining notions
of music making, there is now a pervasive notion in both the rock and
improvisatory fields, and unfortunately, in the field of art music as
well, that if you are not making good money, then you're not making
good art. Lack of a coherent critical criteria had made money a
convenient barometer for measuring musical worth. The decade of the
eighties and the Reagan era saw the birth of the "me generation",
whose artists ravaged any vestige of romantic notion remaining to the
general public of the misunderstood starving artist. Under this
charming view of aesthetics, art and music were made to be easily
accessible, flashily packaged, and to generate hard cash.

The eighties saw an expansion of the modern art
market enabling an entire school of visual artists barely out of
their twenties to become millionaires. This phenomenon had its
reverberations in the music world as well. The commercial success of
such art music composers as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Steve
Reich had predicated a climate where other composers were made to
feel like failures if they chose a musical path whose nature didn't
happen to lend itself to immediate apprehension by masses of people.
This is not to say anything deprecating about the music of Anderson,
Glass, or Reich; there have certainly been many fine composers of art
music in times past whose music brought them both fame and fortune.
Our musical experience of the past twenty years or so has taught us
that it is ridiculous to say music cannot be taken seriously if it is
popular, but we have recently seen an epidemic of reverse prejudice
against music whose complexity precludes immediate comprehension.

The composer Maryanne Amacher once composed a
forty-five minute piece of music for choreographer Merce Cunningham
scored as a duet between the high tones generated by our nervous
systems, which we hear inside our heads, and an external sine wave
frequency of between 15,000 and 17,000 cycles per second. Amacher
would bring the external sine wave in and out of the edge of
consciousness to create a breathtaking new kind of harmony.
Unfortunately, most of the audience heard the piece as 45 minutes of
silence! She performed the same piece at the Kitchen Center in New
York to an audience of about one hundred hardened new music fans. I
would guess that about 15 out the 100 people in attendance were able
to fully appreciate what she was doing.

Are we to say that because comprehension of a
musical idea is limited to only a few that this makes the idea of
limited significance and value to the advancement of musical thought?
How many people in our society fully understand quantum physics, or
for that matter, how many people have any idea of how their fax
machine works? The point which must be stressed is that even arcane
ideas have their place in our community and can eventually have
far-reaching implications for civilization. One of the grave
shortcomings of the West is that we crave instant gratification,
instant profit, and instant accessibility rather than looking ahead
to the long haul. Someone has to do the research, and this applies as
much to music as it does to the field of science. If we don't soon
arrive at a consensus among artists and composers which recognizes
this, we will risk a course of events unfolding in the field of music
in North America similar to the sad story of what happened to our
once vibrant fields of home & computer electronics, hi-fi &
video equipment, the automobile industry, and modern dance.

One of the reasons for the current prejudice in
certain circles against complexity in music is because the
post-serialists gave it such a bad name. When serialism reached its
pinnacle during the fifties, it was a very exciting movement, the
only problem being that many of its composers stagnated there for the
next forty years: all too often its complexity was used as a cover
for a lack of original ideas and bad music. Fortunately for us (as we
saw in Section One of this essay) there were many free-spirited and
adventurous composers during the fifties who, having exhausted their
inquiries into the implications of serialism, had no intention of
sticking around to see the bitter end of a bad movie.

During the modernist period of music in this
century, music was often made as a reaction against something, a
reaction against one's teachers and against the norms imposed on us
by society. While this might still hold true to a certain extent,
especially in the United States with its current First Amendment
debate as it applies to freedom of expression in music and art, the
main musical thrust for the nineties and beyond comes from plain and
simple curiosity, rather than reaction. The possibilities offered us
by our current musical freedom is limited only by our imagination.
Whereas before we were struggling to free ourselves from the bondage
of the academy, now we must free ourselves from limitations we might
be unconsciously imposing on ourselves. This is why an exploration
into the nature of the freedoms we now have is essential for the
present time.

With the advent of minimalism, process music,
phase music, and systemic music, we saw a fresh new approach to
harmonic and melodic content, not to mention form, but now that we've
been through nearly thirty years of this new tonality and simplicity,
perhaps it is time for composers in the 1990s to make their music
complex again, only this time, the issue is not complexity for
complexity's sake. We now well know what can be done by infusing the
music of other cultures or indigenous styles into art music. Perhaps
we have had enough distance from our own recent history to be able to
re-examine the musical proposals of this century as seen from the
perspective we now enjoy.

Rhys Chatham
30 September 1990
Paris, France

Postscript, Summer 1994

When I was writing this essay in the spring/summer of 1990, I did
not include a discussion of two important compositions that were
crucial to the development of my work for electric guitar, Die
Donnergötter (1984-86) and An Angel Moves Too Fast To
See (1989). At the time, I found that it was impossible to write
anything objective about them. Happily, four years later, I now enjoy
a bit more perspective on these compositions and will discuss them
briefly here.

After my non-notated period (1971-81) I returned to notated music
in 1982 and began performing exclusively with my brass band. After a
year or so, I found that I missed my guitar ensemble and decided to
write a series of fully notated pieces for it as well. Of this group
of pieces, the most important was entitled Die
Donnergötter ("the thunder gods"). Scored for six electric
guitars, el. bass and drums, the piece was developed over a two year
period at an amazing performance space in the East Village in NY
called 8 B.C. In addition to my usual concerns with sonority and the
overtone series, Die Donnergötter was significant for me
in that a special compositional emphasis was placed on its melodic
content, which was achieved by fingering directly on the fret board
of the electric guitar (as opposed to the melody being within the
overtones themselves, as in Guitar Trio). This piece, along
with Waterloo No. 2 and Guitar Trio, was released in
Europe on Dossier Records in 1987 and later in America on Homestead
Records.

In 1988, I decided to write an ultimate work for guitar ensemble
entitled An Angel Moves Too Fast To See, which I scored for
100 electric guitars, el. bass and drums. After a somewhat extended
search for a sponsor, Agence Acacia of l'aéronef in Lille,
France bravely decided to commission the piece in 1989. To mount a
performance of Angel, whoever is producing the concert
recruits 100 guitarists, who then learn the music in 5 rehearsals led
by members of my regular working ensemble, which is based in Paris
and New York. The 100 guitarists are divided into six groups with
three separate and special tunings.

I first had the idea to work with a truly large number of electric
guitars back in the early 80s. I made a list and realized that I
personally knew 100 guitarists in New York at the time, so I didn't
think it would be a problem to stage a performance. However, I
hesitated because I didn't want the piece to rely purely on the
visual and visceral impact of massing so many electric guitars in one
place, I felt that I had some more compositional exploring to do. I
wanted to make a piece that would truly exploit the compositional
possibilities of such a gathering: a literal wall-of-electric guitars
on one stage! In 1989, I gathered all the notes I had been putting
together over the years and began to write the piece.

At that point, I had been composing for ensembles of multiple
electric guitars for 12 years. Since this piece was obviously going
to be the pinnacle of my long love affair with the electric guitar,
rather than basing it entirely on a single idea or process (as I
might have done in the 70s or early 80s) I drew entirely on my
musical voice and raw gut to come up with An Angel Moves Too Fast
To See, which owes as much to my roots as a NY post-minimalist as
it does to serious hard rock.

An Angel Moves Too Fast To See was my first evening-length
piece for truly symphonic forces. As of 1994, I have composed two
additional works for "les 100 guitares": Warehouse of Saints;
Songs for Spies (1991), which was commissioned by the Musica
Festival in Strasbourg, and Tauromaquia (1993), commissioned
by the Orbe Theater in Paris.